ABSTRACT
The exploration of the human mind has always been an important part of the novel's repertoire, and the 'psychological novel' of the kind the authors have been examining here is not a genre apart, but simply an expansion of the mental life that all fiction explores to at least a cursory extent. Novels of the mind can slow down what is too rapid to grasp, expand the infinitesimal or capture the evanescent. The cognitive architecture which processes thoughts through metaphor and narrative, and the evolutionary adaptations which may incline the authors to multiply their experience through the virtual lives of fiction, have helped to build the culture of storytelling from which the Western novel emerged. Proust, Bernanos, Breton, Sartre, Beckett, Sarraute, and Darrieussecq turn the novel inwards to explore the mystery of the phenomenon at its source.
